Complete Annotated Bibliography

Agar, M. H. (1986). Speaking of Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Given the increasing use of ethnography in diverse fields, Agar sets out to provide researchers with a common language with which to discuss the merits of, and techniques for, ethnography. He notes that many have tried to conform ethnography to the language of the "received view" of science, and that instead a language of its own must be developed that is responsive to the unique strengths of this method. Agar argues that ethnography grows out of the meeting of "frames of meaning," those of ethnographer and informant. On the other hand, he does not argue for an extreme relativist point of view--the resulting ethnography has something to do with the group being studied, it does describe them. His terminology make experienced ethnographers think again about what they have done, and provide beginners with an orientation to some important concepts.]

Agar, M. H., & MacDonald, J. (1995). Focus Groups and Ethnography. Human Organization, 54(1), 78-86. [Focus groups are treated here by anthropological authors as a tools with pros and cons, but that can be mixed with other qualitative methods with benefit. They make the good point that the focus group is a method that has enthralled quantitative researchers and made them interested in hearing human voices, which in itself is a positive thing. They point out that the point of focus groups, vs. interviews, is to get group members talking with each other. They construct more of the message the interviewer is trying to get with less interviewer intervention. Yet the point of the article is that, as with interviews, there are constraints on conversation set by the form the group takes. Some researchers hope to use groups as a substitute for observing everyday life, yet, a focus group is not everyday life. The authors point out that a focus group is more like a meeting--one in which a manager runs the conversation. They also point out that American conversation style is not conducive to the "focus group dream" of an elaborate conversation that the investigators simply observe (though I think this is the anthropologists' focus group dream rather than all investigators' dream). A focus group can be more like a string of short comments than an elaborate conversation. However, the authors got some information in focus groups they had not gotten in interviews. Yet they did not get some information that they had gotten in interviews. They conclude that having already studied subjects' folk models made focus groups richer. The most useful thing from their focus group was that conversation among group members made reference to folk models investigators already knew about, but did so in some novel ways.]

Agar, M. H. (1996). The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. (second ed.). New York: Academic Press. [This second edition includes an chapter updating the original 1980 edition. This may be a more intricate guide to ethnography than some readers require. But for those who contemplate making ethnography a significant part of their research design, this is an indispensable discussion of the many issues that may arise while designing, proposing, and carrying out ethnographic research. It ranges from abstract consideration of big issues to concrete discussion of particular methods that constitute ethnography. It is sensitive to recent critiques of ethnography, while still being a practical guidebook for beginners. While aimed primarily at anthropologists, Agar is well aware of the more tactical uses ethnography is put to in studies of particular social groups or social problems within our own society.]

Albert, S. A. (1991). Cognition of Caregiving Tasks: Multidimensional Scaling of the Caregiver Task Domain. Gerontologist, 31(6), 726-734. [This study of what caregivers think about during home care tasks is a good example of the administration and analysis of the pile sort task. Fifty-two caregivers for impaired parents were given 25 cards with individual caregiving tasks printed on each one of them. They were asked to sort these cards into piles based on the similarities between the tasks. The study showed three dimensions in the caregiver task domain: type of impairment (physical vs. cognitive-emotional), location of caregiving (home vs. outside), and response to parental incompetence (autonomy fostering vs. guardianship).]

Aldenderfer, M. S., & Blashfield, R. K. (1984). Cluster Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Designed as an introduction for those with no background, this short book covers the variety of methods--all used to create classifications--that are referred to under the heading of cluster analysis. Cluster analysis is generally used by social scientists to reduce data from informants into a representation of how informants classify some domain.]

Altheide, D. L., & Johnson, J. M. (1994). Criteria for Assessing Interpretive Validity in Qualitative Research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 485-599). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [This article discusses the challenges to validity of qualitative research from both the positivist side and the postmodernist side. The authors describe the arguments for why ethnography, and qualitative research in general, can produce valid results.]

Anderson, E. (1978). A Place on the Corner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [This study uses participant observation and ethnographic interviewing in a street-corner bar/liquor store in a poor, largely African-American neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. It is a good example of how these methods can be used to understand the basic social organization of an institution like this and its patrons. Main questions asked are general ones about social statuses, hierarchy, and how men's interactions support the social structure.]

Anderson, E. (1990). Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [In this book the author, Elijah Anderson, shows how a ghetto can be created inside a middle-class neighborhood, and how the two distinctly different communities interact. Most of Anderson's data was collected by moving into such a community and examining, through a variety of methods, how things work. Through participant observation, Anderson became very sociable with the people of both communities, including everything from cops to drug dealers. Another important source of data were video taping, photo, and interviews. The book presents many of the personal accounts yielded by these interviews. He documents through his own experience, and through the eyes of many kinds of informants, the development of a ghetto.]

Arabie, P., Carroll, J. D., & DeSarbo, W. S. (1987). Three-Way Scaling and Clustering. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Building on the introductory writings of Kruskal and Wish (1978) the present authors describe the uses and possible relationship between multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering. The emphasis in on the uses of these methods in analysis of qualitative data.]

Ash, P., Kellermann, A. L., Fuqua-Whitley, D., & Johnson, A. (1996). Gun Acquisition and Use by Juvenile Offenders. Journal of the American Medical Association, 275(22), 1754-1758. [This is a fascinating account of why and how juvenile offenders acquired guns. Authors used semistructured interviews. Their use and presentation of data is exemplary, and the short description of "human subjects considerations" gives an idea of the kinds of ethics considerations qualitative interviewers run up against.]

Bailey, K. D. (1994). Typologies and Taxonomies: An Introduction to Classification Techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Among an increasing number of works that deal with systematic data collection, this book explains the details of classification techniques for cluster analysis. Bailey notes that classification involves the ordering of cases in terms of their similarity and can be broken down into 2 essential approaches: typology and taxonomy. This book should be valuable to those interested in modeling the cultural understandings of informants.]

Bauman, L. J., & Adair, E. G. (1992). The Use of Ethnographic Interviewing to Inform Questionnaire Construction. Health Education Quarterly, 19(1), 9-23. [The authors describe the use of ethnographic interviews in the preparation of a quantitative interview questionnaire. Though qualitative methods are often used in the preparation of a research tool, it is unusual to use ethnographic interviews. The authors describe the use of ethnographic interviews for this purpose, and give examples from interviews of urban mothers of children with chronic illnesses.]

Becker, H. S., Geer, B., Hughes, E. C., & Strauss, A. L. (1961). Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [A good example of successful multimethod research, this book sought to chronicle the lives of medical students from a symbolic interactionist perspective. The focus is on what they learn, how well they learn it, and how it affects them as individuals. Authors collected data on individual experiences before and during medical school, personal ideas on the field of medicine, and what their future plans might be. Conflict in the work and lives of students, and its affect on the medical school social setting, was a special emphasis of the study. Authors used participant observation in a medical school as the backbone of their study. Quantitative analysis of surveys and questionnaires was also used as well as qualitative interviews with individual students.]

Becker, H. S. (1970). Sociological Work: Method and Substance. Chicago: Aldine. [This book is useful for those delving into tough questions about the reliability and validity of qualitative methods. Especially to be recommended are chapters three through five. In chapter three, "Field Work Evidence," Becker confronts the harsh question of the validity of qualitative fieldwork. He gives convincing reasons why fieldwork produces believable results. It "gives us information on people acting under the very social constraints whose operation we are interested in, and because its numerous items of information and flexible procedures allow us to test our conclusions repeatedly . . ., we need not fear that its unsystematic character will distort our findings" (62). In "The Life History and the Scientific Mosaic," the author discusses the uses of life histories as a part of sociological field research. And in "Social Observation and Social Case Studies," he discusses case studies in a similar way.]

Benfer, R. A. J., & Furbee, L. (1993). A Beginning Guide to Expert Systems: 1. Knowledge Trees. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 5(3), 10-12. [A guide to inferring the structure of expert knowledge from texts of what people say.]

Bernard, H. R., Killworth, P., Kronenfeld, D., & Sailer, L. (1984). The Problem of Informant Accuracy: The Validity of Retrospective Data. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 495-517. [Authors tackle the problem of the accuracy of informant. When we ask people for information, just how accurate is that information likely to be? Some qualitative work elicits informants' accounts of things with unmeasurable accuracy, such as their opinions, or the results of introspection. But other qualitative work depends on the accuracy of informant's objective accounts of what they, and other members of their society, do. However, there is no theory for measuring that accuracy. This article is a tentative first step in that direction.]

Bernard, H. R., Pelto, P. J., Werner, O., Boster, J., Romney, A. K., Johnson, A., Ember, C. R., & Kasakoff, A. (1986). The Construction of Primary Data in Cultural Anthropology. Current Anthropology, 27(4), 382-396. [Authors turn their attention to the reliability, validity, and accuracy of the materials anthropologists generally collect. They focus on structured interviews, unstructured interviews, direct observation, and information from archives or other existing records. An excellent discussion for those who are asking how dependable qualitative data is, and for what.]

Bernard, H. R. (1991). About Text Management and Computers. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 3(1), 1-4, 7, 12. [Clear description of different types of text management, including issues associated with indexing, coding, and text retrieval. Useful background for those needing ways of thoroughly analyzing text produced by qualitative interviews, or other qualitative data collection methods.]

Bernard, H. R. (1994). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [An excellent, clearly written, review of a wide array of data collection and analysis techniques. Considered the best methods book in anthropology. Bernard covers both qualitative and quantitative methods and implicitly constructs a guide to mixing these methods during anthropological fieldwork. Should be useful to investigators from any field interested in multimethod research.]

Bernard, H. R. (1995). Counting Words in Documents: WORDS 2.0. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 7(3), 11-12. [Describes various ways of counting up words in qualitative texts using the WORDS 2.0 computer program.]

Bernard, H. R. (1996). Qualitative Data, Quantitative Analysis. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 8(1), 9-11. [Texts are created in qualitative research by taping or just writing what people say. Other kinds of texts may be collected in the course of research. Bernard notes that texts can be analyzed in both qualitative and quantitative ways. He some quantitative analyses of text.]

Bolton, R. (1984). Computers in Ethnographic Research (Technical Report NIE Grant G-78-0062). Claremont, CA: Pomona College. [An early, barebones account of how to use computers to take and manage fieldnotes. A hidden classic.]

Borgatti, S. (1989). Using Anthropac to Investigate a Cultural Domain. Cultural Anthropology Methods Newsletter, 1(2), 11. [This short article describes the Anthropac computer program. It is a program that is designed to do analyses of the kinds of data described in Weller and Romney (1988). Author describes simple steps for entering and analyzing free lists using ANTHROPAC.]

Boster, J., Berlin, B., & O'Neill, J. (1986). The Correspondence of Jivaroan to Scientific Ornithology. American Anthropologist, 88, 569-583. [This is an example of the use of the pile sort method to collect data on similarity of one bird species to another according to Jivaroan folk-ornithology (South American indigenous group). A comparative analysis was made between the folk taxonomy and systematic biological taxonomy, and between two Jivaroan groups' folk taxonomies. This is an excellent example of the use of pile sort data, while others sources are more explicit about the methodology itself (Weller and Romney, 1988).]

Boster, J. (1994). The Successive Pile Sort. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 6(2), 11-12. [Pile sorts (see Weller and Romney 1988) can be used in a variety of different ways to collect data about how people perceive and model their world. The successive pile sort can be used when you want to compare across informants.]

Brannen, J. (1992). Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches: An Overview. In J. Brannen (Ed.), Mixing Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Research (pp. 3-37). Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. [In the first section Brannen discusses issues that blur the usual distinctions between qualitative and quantitative research. She notes that both processes involve aspects of "analytic induction" and "enumerative induction," as well as deductive methods. There is also a misunderstanding about heavy description only being associated with qualitative work. She confronts the issue of compatibility of quantitative and qualitative methods, noting that some believe mixing methods increases validity through triangulation while others believe that data is constructed differently by different methods, and thus can only "complement" each other rather than validate each other. In the second section, Brannen discusses ways qualitative and quantitative methods are usual combined. It is extremely useful for those thinking about whether the combination of methods will be primarily used to support quantitative findings, to support qualitative findings, or whether the project will use a more balanced mix of qualitative and quantitative methods.]

Brown, G. W., & Harris, T. O. (1978). Social Origins of Depression: A Study of Psychiatric Disorder in Women. New York: Free Press. [Has been cited as an excellent example of the use of structured, in-depth interviews in a health research setting. Brown and Harris were able to code the meaning for informants of stressful lives events as part of their study of how these life events affected depressive symptoms.]

Burton, M. L., & Nerlove, S. B. (1976). Balanced Designs for Triads Tests: Two Examples from English. Social Science Research, 5, 247-267. [This article treats a particular problem in the collection of triad data, as described in Weller and Romney (1988). For complicated issues, the number of triads needed for a triad test can be far beyond what is practical to collect from informants. Burton and Nerlove created a lambda design for reducing the number of triads in a triads test.]

Cayton, H., & Drake, S. C. (1945). Black Metropolis. [Study of south side of Chicago in late '30s. Held to be a good example of the combination of qualitative and quantitative data.]

Chavez, L. R., Hubbell, F. A., McMullin, J. M., Martinez, R. G., & Mishra, S. I. (1995). Structure and Meaning in Models of Breast and Cervical Cancer Risk Factors: A Comparison of Perceptions among Latinas, Anglo Women, and Physicians. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 9(1), 40-74. [Authors use a method called cultural consensus analysis, a way to assesses the level of agreement, or cultural consensus, within and between groups. Investigators typically collect information, often collecting free lists, about a particular phenomenon in order to lay out the range of pertinent emic categories. Then individuals from each group under study are asked if that category is pertinent to them. A mathematical model is used to determine the "culturally correct" answers for each group, and the degree of consensus within that group. The model allow investigators to determine whether different groups hold significantly different consensual models (see Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986). The authors use this method to examine perceptions about breast and cervical cancer among Latinas, Anglo women, and physicians. Interesting differences between these groups are found which have important public health implications.]

Coreil, J. (1995). Group Interview Methods in Community Health Research. Medical Anthropology, 16, 193-210. [This is another good general review of focus groups. The author notes that the popularity of focus groups has skyrocketed without a concomitant development in scholarly approaches to their use. She tries to remedy this situation.]

D'Andrade, R. G., Quinn, N. R., Nerlove, S. B., & Romney, A. K. (1972). Categories of Disease in American-English and Mexican-Spanish. In A. K. Romney, R. N. Shepard, & S. B. Nerlove (Eds.), Multidimensional Scaling: Theory and Applications in the Behavioral Sciences (Vol. 2, pp. 9-54). New York: Seminar Press. [Uses frame substitution techniques to query informants about illness terms.]

D'Andrade, R. (1976). A Propositional Analysis of U.S. American Beliefs about Illness. In K. Basso & H. A. Selby (Eds.), Meaning in Anthropology (pp. 155-247). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. [This is a chapter in the development of systematic, statistical methods to abstract people's cultural models from what they say in a naturalistic setting. D'Andrade argues that the method used in D'Andrade, et al. (1972)--using multidimensional scaling (MDS) to order data on people's illness beliefs--was misguided. He notes that it was based on the "feature model" of human knowledge--"each object is assumed to be placed in relation to other objects on the basis of the conjunction of a limited number of attribute values." He argues that like the earlier method of componential analysis, MDS--when based on the feature model--fails to comprehend how people actually "go about believing." He uses some of the data from the earlier publication to describe an alternative subset-superset analysis that he thinks better models they way people actually think.]

D'Andrade, R. (1987). A Folk Model of the Mind. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural Models in Language and Thought (pp. 112-148). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [After a review of "schema theory," D'Andrade describes the data he collected--undergraduates' descriptions of the human mind during semistructured interviews. He describes how one can make explicit the unconscious cultural model, or schema, that generates what people say about such a domain. Though none of the informants could have described their cultural "model of the mind," he claims it can be inferred from what they said.]

D'Andrade, R. (1991). The Identification of Schemas in Naturalistic Data. In M. J. Horowitz (Ed.), Person Schemas and Maladaptive Interpersonal Patterns . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Author reviews "schema theory," as currently conceived by cognitive psychologists and anthropologists. In light of this he reviews the work on "person schemas"--the theme of this edited volume--and how they may be abstracted from "naturalistic data" (in this case the conversations between clients and therapists). He critiques a method of schema identification used by other authors in the book and suggests Claudia Strauss' concept of the "personal semantic network" as a good alternative for examining people's "person schemas."]

Dabbs, J. M. J. (1982). Making Things Visible. In J. Van Maanen, J. M. J. Dabbs, & R. R. Faulkner (Eds.), Varieties of Qualitative Research (pp. 31-63). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [An article uniquely written, by a data-oriented thinker. He advocates "formal sociology," more like the microsociology of Goffman than the ethnography of anthropologists. "It examines individuals and groups from the outside, focusing upon the minutiae of daily life" (33). He discusses the utility of "nonreactive," or "unobtrusive" measures (see also Webb, et al., 1981). Dabbs discusses some interesting ways of displaying data, and also a way of using cameras to collect data "through subjects' eyes.' But all-in-all this article may be more appropriate for an investigator with some experience under his or her belt than for the beginning qualitative "user."]

Davis, F. (1980). The Cabdriver and his Fare: Facets of a Fleeting Relationship. In L. Coser (Ed.), The Pleasures of Sociology (pp. 515). New York: New American Library. [Not a methodologically explicit piece, but a pleasant example of the kind of insight that can be gained through participating in the activity one is writing about (much like the chapters in Spradley and McCurdy 1972). Davis, having been a Chicago cabby in one of his pre-sociologist incarnations, details both the cab driving culture as well as the type and quality of interactions that cabbies expect to have with the public given the relatively brief and random nature of the passenger driver relationship.]

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (1994). Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Contains 36 chapters by noted researchers grouped into sections labeled "Locating the Field," "Major Paradigms and Perspectives," "Strategies of Inquiry," "Methods of Collecting and Analyzing Empirical Materials," "The Art of Interpretation, Evaluation, and Presentation," and "The Future of Qualitative Research." Some of the chapters in this book are listed separately in the different sections of this bibliography.]

Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [This is a fairly recent addition to the sparse literature on fieldnotes. Authors cover taking fieldnotes in the field, seeking the "meanings" in them, coding them, and using them in the "write up" stage. Their approach to analysis of fieldnotes is a more traditional one, without the emphasis on systematic methods of analyzing text. However, they are sensitive to a variety of typical situations encountered in the field, and teach readers how to use those situations to produce useful notes. A good text for anyone planning to write a lot of notes or observations.]

Erickson, P. I. (1997). Contraceptive Methods: Do Hispanic Adolescents and Their Family Planning Care Providers Think about Contraceptive Methods the Same Way? Medical Anthropology, 17, 65-82. [Article discusses how Hispanic adolescents and their family planning care providers perceive contraceptive methods. Different contraceptive methods are pile-sorted by the subjects on perceived similarities and differences, according to effectiveness, safety, and use performance. Conceptual models were identified and compared by multidimensional scaling.]

Fabrega, H. J., & Manning, P. K. (1979). Illness Episodes, Illness Severity and Treatment Options in a Pluralistic Setting. Social Science and Medicine, 13B(1), 41-51. [This article describes the use, in an ethnographic setting of a method for analyzing episodes of illness. For the purposes of this analysis, and consistent with focus on the "social costs" of illness, authors concentrated on informants' descriptions of what they did about actual illness episodes rather than more abstract kind of information. Information was collected from indigenas (Native Americans) and Ladino (Euro-American) women in southern Mexico. Results showed differences between these groups in kinds and definitions of illnesses encountered in these groups.]

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [When Prophecy Fails is an interesting exploration of what happens to cults when the central belief of the group is undermined--in this case, when space aliens do not materialize as predicted. It also serves as an example of the ethical perils of certain types of qualitative research; Festinger's work has been critiqued by those who believe that the project researchers became inappropriately involved in the lives of the cult members.]

Fiedler, J. (1978). Field Research: A Manual for Logistics and Management of Scientific Studies in Natural Settings. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. [This is a "management-oriented" manual to running a field research project. Focus is on planning, site selection, communications, staffing, budgeting, money management, and supplies. A good guidebook for those managing their first project, or a larger project than they have managed before.]

Fine, G. A., & Sandstrom, K. L. (1988). Knowing Children: Participant Observation with Minors. (Vol. 15). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [A discussion of the process of doing participant observation with children. The book is divided into chapters treating very young children, preadolescents, and adolescents. The book is heavy with discussions of ethics and gives several real dilemmas that researchers faced while trying to simultaneously obtain children's trust and play the inevitable aspects of the role of an adult among children. It is a useful orientation for those who have not worked in the role of observer among children.]

Gallimore, R., Goldenberg, C., & Weisner, T. (1993). The Social Construction and Subjective Reality of Activity Settings: Implications for Community Psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 21(4), 537-559. [This article provides useful background for how to think about the units of analysis when studying community psychology and child development. It focuses on the "activity setting" and gives examples of how this concept has informed multimethod research with several research populations, including Native Hawaiian children, Spanish-speaking children and their immigrant parents, and Euro-American families with a developmentally delayed child. Useful for anyone considering using ecocultural scales.]

Garfinkel, H. (1974). The Origins of the Term 'Ethnomethodology'. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology (pp. 15-18). Baltimore: Penguin. [Ethnomethodology: "'Ethno' seemed to refer, somehow or other, to the availability to a member of common-sense knowledge of his society as common-sense knowledge of the 'whatever'. If it were 'ethnobotany', then it had to do somehow or other with his knowledge of and his grasp of what were for members adequate methods for dealing with botanical matters" (16-17). "That is what ethnomethodology is concerned with. It is an organizational study of a member's knowledge of his ordinary affairs, of his own organized enterprises, where that knowledge is treated by us as part of the same setting that it also makes orderable" (18).

Garro, L. Y. (1982). Introduction: The Ethnography of Health Care Decisions. Social Science and Medicine, 16, 1451-1452. [An introduction to a special issue regarding health care decision making in several societies.]

Garro, L. C. (1988). Explaining High Blood Pressure: Variation in Knowledge about Illness. American Ethnologist, 15, 98-117. [Garro attempts to construct a model of which knowledge about high blood pressure is culturally shared, and what is idiosyncratic. How do you decide how much sharing necessary for a cultural model?, she asks. Garro uses case studies and consensus analysis in studying Ojibwa people's understanding of high blood pressure. She uses the former to show the great variation, including idiosyncratic variation, in knowledge about the illness, and the former to show how knowledge is shared.]

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. [This is a collection of Geertz' early articles well known for his explication of the "interpretive" approach to ethnographic description.]

Gillespie, G. (1986). Using Word Processor Macros for Computer-assisted Qualitative Analysis. Qualitative Sociology, 9, 283-292. [Early paper advocating the use of word processors to help with simple text analysis. It discusses how to minimize the procedure of recording and analyzing field notes for qualitative research, saving time and reducing repetitive input. This is done by using keyboard macros, which are recorded sequences of computer commands, that can be utilized as needed. General knowledge and specific applications of this technique are explained in this article.]

Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine. [Authors focus on the emergence and revision of analytic categories from open-ended fieldwork or ethnography.]

Gold, S. (1994). Israeli Immigrants in the United States: The Question of Community. Qualitative Sociology, 17(4), 325-363. [Article examines Israeli immigrant communities in Los Angeles and suggests earlier literature portraying "social and psychological alienation" and incapability of "creating viable ethnic communities" is misleading. Methods used included interviews, participant observation, and a survey. These were augmented with a "photoelicitation" task in which investigators' photographs of immigrants at social events were shown to informants and used to elicit further "data about how members of communities understand their environment and view each other" (330).]

Goldenbert, C. (1992). The Limits of Expectations: A Case for Case Knowledge about Teacher Expectancy Effects. American Educational Research Journal, 29(3), 517-544. [This article demonstrates the use of a limited number of case studies--two--to examine a very specific question. In this case the question is about how the expectations of teachers for students relate to the achievement of those students. One child who was followed was expected to do well, and one was not. From the results Goldenberg argues that expectations of teachers are overemphasized by theorists, and that what a teacher does is more important that what he or she expects.]

Good, B., & Good, M. J. D. (1980). The Meaning of Symptoms: A Cultural Hermeneutic Model for Clinical Practice. In L. Eisenberg & A. Kleinman (Eds.), The Relevance of Social Science for Medicine. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel. [Authors describe the interpretive act that is necessary for a meaning-centered approach to illness and medicine. With many case examples, they argue for an approach to clinical practice that focuses on the meaning of symptoms in people's lives. Though method is not made explicit in this article, much can be deduced about what qualitative research can add to our understanding of illness, and what some of our research goals should be.]

Greene, J., & Caracelli, V. (Eds.). (1997a). Advances in Mixed-Method Evaluation: The Challenges and Benefits of Integrating Diverse Paradigms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. [A good-looking collection of articles about mixing methods. First article contains a description and critique of three different paradigms for mixing methods (see Greene and Caracelli 1997).]

Greene, J., & Caracelli, V. (1997b). Defining and Describing the Paradigm Issue in Mixed-Method Evaluation. In J. C. Greene & V. J. Caracelli (Eds.), Advances in Mixed-Method Evaluation: The Challenges and Benefits of Integrating Diverse Paradigms (pp. 74). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. [Useful description and critique of the "purist," "pragmatist," and "dialectical" positions on mixing methods. The purist stance prevents mixing methods because the methods are instantiations of epistemologies that are inherently incompatible. The pragmatist position says that epistemologies should be taken as descriptions and not prescriptions, and that methods can be mixed because the main driving forces for research are the practical demands of the questions that are being asked. The dialectical position maintains the importance of the underlying epistemologies and suggests that different research paradigms cannot be reconciled. Authors note that just as each research tradition tends to justify its methods using ideal models (rather than realistic models) of how such research is carried out, so too do each of these positions on mixing methods take idealist positions. They ask what the appropriate relationship between mixed paradigms should be in practice (evaluation projects). The suggest a middle position between pragmatists and dialecticalists, giving neither full authority to epistemologies nor to practicalities of research.

Hamel, J. (1993). Case Study Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [One of the few comprehensive texts on how to use and manage case studies.]

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press. [This book constitutes an example of extended ethnographic fieldwork brought to bear on the question of how families in southern communities of different socioeconomic status and ethnicity differently prepare their children for literacy. The author made extensive use of both day to day observations, ethnographic interviews, and more focused interviews.]

Hedges, A. (1985). Group Interviewing. In R. Walker (Ed.), Applied Qualitative Research . Brookfield, VT: Gower. [A good discussion of the reasons for group interviewing, the pros and cons, and the different uses they might be put to.]

Helitzer-Allen, D. L., & Kendall, C. (1992). Explaining Differences between Qualitative and Quantitative Data: A Study of Chemoprophylaxis during Pregnancy. Health Education Quarterly, 19(1), 41-54. [Authors describe how "program oriented research" using multiple methods can assist in getting valid results in relatively short-term fieldwork. They suggest a "hybrid research design" that allows for triangulation and greater validity in a situation where long-term fieldwork or in-depth pilot studies are not feasible (often for financial reasons). They amply demonstrate the usefulness of hybrid research in medical intervention settings by describing a project in Malawi. Clinical tests and surveys found that few pregnant women were taking chloroquine (as they were instructed to do). Few of the ones who said they had taken it in the last week in fact had blood levels consistent with that. Ethnography suggested reasons why. Clinical tests, surveys, and ethnography were all necessary to get desired results.]

Hughes, D., & DuMont, K. (1993). Using Focus Groups to Facilitate Culturally Anchored Research. American Journal of Community Psychology, 21(6), 775-806. [Authors see focus groups as a way of combining interviewing with observation to ground psychological survey research that deals with different cultural groups. They give advice on the stages of preparing for, carrying out, and analyzing focus groups. They give an example of a project that used focus groups in tandem with structured interview in an attempt to understand the way "racial job stressors" affected "racial socialization" of children among African-Americans. Focus group information was used independently to analyze cultural background of participants, as well as to help guide the conceptualization of the research and to revise a survey instrument that attempted to establish measures of these constructs.]

Humphreys, L. (1970). Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Chicago: Aldine. [Study of impersonal sexual encounters between men in bathrooms ("tearooms"), bathhouses, and other locations. Researcher posed as a participant in order to study this behavior, but always took the role of voyeur or lookout. (So the method involved a kind of faked "participant observation.") He traced men involved in these brief, impersonal encounters through their auto license plates and included them in a health-related survey. This book is an interesting demonstration of participant observation used without the common addition of ethnographic interviews. It is also a good example of ethnic dilemmas that researchers confront when observing illicit activities. Humphreys demonstrates a comprehensive use of methods to protect the anonymity of research subjects within his written accounts. However, he also uses some research methods that might easily be considered unethical were they used today. His posing as a participant when he really wasn't, and not admitting his identity as a sociologist, would raise ethical concerns of most human subjects review boards (he told only a few confederates his true identity). Also, his tracking of participants using car licenses (without their consent) and his use of the health survey data--unbeknownst to subjects--in his study of tearoom encounters both violate the ethic of full disclosure to subjects of the intent of the research efforts that include them.]

Jehn, K. A., & Werner, O. (1993). Hapax Legomenon II: Theory, a Thesaurus, and Word Frequency. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 5(1), 8-10. [Suggests developing a list of key words from qualitative texts for theme constructs. Then one can use the key words to test specific hypotheses.]

Jehn, K. A., & Doucet, L. (1996). Developing Categories from Interview Data: Text Analysis and Multidimensional Scaling. Part 1. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 8(2), 15-16. [Authors describe a specific series of steps for using text analysis and multidimensional scaling to develop thematic categories from interview data.]

Jehn, K. A., & Doucet, L. (1997). Developing Categories for Interview Data: Consequences of Different Coding and Analysis Strategies in Understanding Text: Part 2. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 9(1), 1-7. [Part 2 of an article in which authors describe a specific series of steps for using text analysis and multidimensional scaling to develop thematic categories from interview data.]

Jessor, R., Colby, A., & Shweder, R. A. (Eds.). (1996). Ethnography and Human Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Edited volume with several interesting chapters by notables in the field of human development. Chapters demonstrate the use of ethnography in human development studies as well as discuss practical and epistemological questions regarding qualitative methods. Some authors (e.g., Becker, Shweder, Weisner) discuss the qualitative/quantitative rift and arrive at unique perspectives.]

Johnson, S. (1967). Hierarchical Clustering Schemes. Psychometrika, 32, 241-253. [Discusses a was of separating objects of a study into similar groups based on how much overlap the objects have in various fields of measure. This placement is based on a hierarchical system of grouping. And through this, two general systems of clustering are explained. One bases clusters on how related the objects are, and the other forms clusters that are compact.]

Johnson, J. (1986). Social Networks and Innovation Adoption: A Look at Burt's Use of Structural Equivalence. Social Networks, 8, 343-364. [An interesting look at social networks and innovation, employing an innovative qualitative sampling procedure.]

Johnson, J. C. (1990). Selecting Ethnographic Informants. (Vol. 22). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [After a brief but useful discussion of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods, Johnson delves into ethnographic sampling. Beyond simply comparing the uses of probability and non-probability samples, he notes that sampling may at times be driven by concerns other than characterizing the entire population. The classic anthropological example is that in a small village a strict probably sample might miss the shaman. But Johnson gives several practical examples of how communities or organizations may be sampled that might be more relevant to many readers. The main point is that there are many options beyond strict probability sampling and that the selection of a sample should be driven by the nature of the question being asked. He goes on to demonstrate how fieldwork and network analysis may produce information on one's existing sample that leads to a greater understanding of the nature of the sample and that may suggest new avenues of research.]

Johnson, J., & Orback, M. (1990). Fishery in Transition: The Impact of Urbanization on Florida's Spiny Lobster Fishery. City and Society, 4(1), 88-104. [Excellent discussion of some of the decision making behind qualitative sampling, and an instructive example of sampling in one research project regarding lobster fishermen.]

Johnson, A., & Johnson, O. R. (1990). From Quality to Quantity: On the Measurement Potential of Ethnographic Fieldnotes. In R. Sanjek (Ed.), Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology (pp. 161-186). Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press. [First, the Johnsons argue for anthropological holism, which they say anthropologists still pay homage to but usually don't practice anymore. Everyone's fieldnotes, they say, could benefit from being more holistic. They append an ethnographic checklist they suggest fieldworkers look at every day, or frequently, to see if they have observed anything or learned anything from the various categories on the list. The idea that culture is an integrated whole still lives here. Second, they suggest counting things. Ethnographies often contain many vague observations of frequency or tendency which could be made somewhat more exacting (if not necessarily statistically sophisticated) by simple counting. While mainly directed at anthropologists in a post-modern, somewhat anti-scientific era, this chapter might be of interest to those planning to make short-term ethnography a big part of future data collection. (The chapter ends with a discussion of simple computer-assisted thematic tagging of textual passages for which more help is available from more recent publications.)]

Johnson, E. (1995). Counting Words and Computing Word Frequency Project Report: WORDS. TEXT Technology, 5(1), 8-17. [Describes the program WORDS 2.0 that counts word frequencies in text documents.]

Kempton, W., Boster, J., & Hartley, J. (1995). Environmental Values in American Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [This is an excellent example of the combined use of creative sampling, open-ended interviewing, and well constructed questionnaires. Together they give us a very eye-opening account of Americans' environmental thinking. Originally setting out to simply ask about global warming, ozone depletion, and species loss, the authors quickly found that their interviewees had a deeper set of cultural models which had to be understood before their answers about ozone depletion, etc., made sense. This ethnographic background made possible a much more informed questionnaire which they then administered to diverse groups such as Sierra Club members, loggers, and radical environmentalists from Earth First! The differences, and striking similarities, between these groups in their answers to survey questions was only fully comprehensible in light of cultural models identified in earlier in-depth, unstructured interviews.]

Kleinman, A. (1988). The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books. [This is a passionate statement for the use of "mini-ethnography" in a clinical, psychiatric setting in order to understand patients better. Its message can be generalized to the research setting. Kleinman's book is a good source for background information on the clinical use of qualitative data, as well as a textbook use of qualitative interviewing and observation in the clinical setting.]

Koester, D., & Thorn, M. (1993). Programming in WordPerfect to Aid in Text Analysis. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 5(2), 4-5. [Describes a WordPerfect "macro" for searching for and pulling blocks of text associated with multiple words.]

Krippendorff, K. (1980). Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [This is the most detailed book available on context analysis. Includes excellent discussion of intercoder reliability and validity issues.]

Krueger, R. A. (1994). Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [A very useful text designed to help those who need practical help planning and carrying out focus groups.]

Kruskal, J. B., & Wish, M. (1978). Multidimensional Scaling. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [This is a basic introduction to the use of multidimensional scaling, a method that has become very popular for some kinds of analyses of qualitative data. It has introduced many social scientists to this method.]

Lancy, D. F. (1993). Qualitative Research in Education: An Introduction to the Major Traditions. New York: Longman Publishing Group. [A good source book for qualitative studies in education. Examines the different questions and methodologies that anthropological, sociological, and biological perspectives bring to education research. Excellent chapters on ethology, case studies, and cognitive studies. A good set of guidelines for setting up and doing qualitative research.]

Levine, H. G., Gallimore, R., Weisner, T. S., & Turner, J. L. (1980). Teaching Participant-Observation Research Methods: A Skills-Building Approach. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 11(1), 38-54. [This article describes the way the authors teach their participant observation training course at UCLA and how they recommend that others approach teaching such a course. However, they make explicit some important points regarding the skills necessary to do good observation, including role management and ethics, observing, recording, interviewing, and data reduction and analysis. Short discussions of these are good.]

Liebow, E. (1967). Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. [Liebow's ethnographic study of urban, African-American men is a classic of urban ethnography. He collected data for a year mainly through participant observation and questioning of two dozen men who use Washington's Second Precinct as a base of operation. Liebow compares the lives of these men with African-American men who are not "streetcorner" men. He includes some case descriptions of some men. Like Whyte's book about an Italian slum, Liebow includes an appendix which describes his preparation for fieldwork and his experiences collecting data.]

Lofland, J., & Lofland, L. (1995). Analyzing Social Settings. (third ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. [An extremely useful "handbook" for researchers beginning qualitative research, the Loflands offer practical guidance on conducting and interpreting participant observation research.]

MacQueen, K. M., Nopkesorn, T., Sweat, M. D., Sawaengdee, Y., Mastro, T. D., & Weniger, B. G. (1996). Alcohol Consumption, Brothel Attendance, and Condom Use: Normative Expectations among Thai Military Conscripts. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 10(3), 402-423. [Objective of the article is to find the correlation between alcohol consumption and not using a condom. Data was collected from 10 focus groups. The transcribed and translated results were coded using The Ethnograph, a computer program aiding textual analysis. Results showed that alcohol consumption was used in a brothel to ease discomfort between the soldiers and female workers, to provide an excuse for not wearing a condom, to make sex better, and it also make the males feel less sexually shy.]

Maxwell, J. A. (1992). Understanding and Validity in Qualitative Research. Harvard Educational Review, 62(3), 279-300. [Maxwell describes five ways of defining validity used in qualitative research: Descriptive validity, interpretive validity, theoretical validity, generalizability, and evaluative validity. The point is to widen the reader's perspective on what can constitute the validity in the face of a multitude of available research topics--not all of which are investigated by the methods dictated by the "received view." Maxwell bases validity on a kind of common sense understanding of what is being studied, derived from the ground up though observations of how researchers actually justify the validity of their work.]

McCracken, G. (1988). The Long Interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [McCracken illuminates how the long, qualitative interview can be used to capture how people see their world. It can be used, he writes (in a veiled counterpoint to long-term ethnography) "in such a way that neither the respondent nor the investigator must make extraordinary sacrifices in time or privacy" (65). Qualitative interviews do indeed provide the single most valuable source of information to most qualitative research and in this book McCracken gives us a brief, yet comprehensive guide to formulating questions, carrying out interviews, and analyzing the results.]

Merton, R. K., Fiske, M., & Kendall, P. L. (1990). The Focused Interview: A Manual of Problems and Procedures. (second ed.). New York: Free Press. [This is a classic description of a certain kind of qualitative interviewing--the "focused interview." Authors note that a key use of the focused interview is to not only get informants' responses to a stimulus, but to conduct the interview in such a way that their responses reliably match their actual perceptions of that stimulus. Put another way, the idea is to elicit discourse that reflects as closely as possible informants' mental models. Authors cover useful topics such as "retrospection," "range," and "specificity" of focused interviews. They also examine the issue of the "depth" of informant responses, suggesting ways to facilitate the recording of "affective" reactions to a stimulus. Authors also discuss differences in interviewing individuals as opposed to groups.]

Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative Data Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [This is a key text that helps the investigator think about issues that arise throughout the course of qualitative research. It does so by focusing on how the data will eventually be analyzed and presented. This is a very useful and comprehensive guide to keeping your research relevant and "on track" from the beginning.]

Mitchell, S. K. (1979). Interobserver Agreement, Reliability, and Generalizability of Data Collected in Observational Studies. Psychological Bulletin, 86(2), 376-390. [Fantastic overview of reliability measures. Author notes that reliability in qualitative data analysis is really about validity. Article discusses the quality of data collected in observational studies. Three factors considered are the percentage of interobserver agreement, the reliability coefficient, and the generizability coefficient. Article concludes that interobserver agreement is the most important of the three, however by itself it is not enough to insure the quality of the data.]

Moore, C., & Romney, A. K. (1996). Material Culture, Geographic Propinquity, and Linguistic Affiliation on the North Coast of New Guinea: A Reanalysis of Welsch, Terrell, and Nadolski (1992). American Anthropologist, 96, 370-391. [The original study investigated how geographic propinquity, material culture, and linguistic affiliation are related. The study took place on the North Coast of New Guinea. In the original study, a variation was found in the relationship between material culture and geographic propinquity, but linguistic affiliation had no effect on that variation. However, in the reanalysis, it is found that linguistic affiliation and geographic propinquity have equally powerful effects on the variation.]

Morgan, D. L. (Ed.). (1993). Successful Focus Groups: Advancing the State of the Art. (Vol. 156). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [This book tackles the issues and problems of running a focus group from the perspective of many researchers who use them. Morgan portrays state of the art techniques for using focus groups. Chapters cover such principles as how to us focus groups, applicability of focus groups, general issues of focus groups, problems with focus groups in different settings and populations, and the future development of the method.]

Morgan, D. L. (1997). Focus Groups as Qualitative Research. (second ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Another of the many recent publications on focus groups, this one focuses on the focus group as a qualitative method, and instructs on how to best use them as such.]

Morgan, D. L., & Krueger, R. A. (Eds.). (1997). Focus Group Kit. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Hot off the presses, the six volumes in this set promise to be a complete account of the state of the art for focus groups, as of 1997.]

Morse, J. M. (1994). Designing Funded Qualitative Research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 220-235). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Lots of good basic points here about designing research, from the earliest "stage of reflection" to the write up. Best part of the article focuses on thinking about what kind of information you want to collect and how to go about collecting it. Author discusses the philosophical traditions behind qualitative methods (phenomenology, ethnography, grounded theory, etc.) and gives excellent examples of how those methods might play themselves out in a given research project. See especially the charts on pages 224 and 225.]

Nichter, M., & Nichter, M. (1994). Acute Respiratory Illness: Popular Health Culture and Mother's Knowledge in the Philippines. Medical Anthropology, 15, 353-375. [Authors combine traditional ethnography with other systematic methods of data collection and analysis (free lists, pile sorts, structured interviews). Different sections describe and compare the results of each of these methods. The focus of the study was on acute respiratory illness in the Philippines. The methods employed allowed investigators to comment on "prototypical ideas" about respiratory illness as well as to compare "cognitive" and "embodied" (or practice-based) knowledge.]

O'Brian, K. (1993). Improving Survey Questionnaires Through Focus Groups. In D. L. Morgan (Ed.), Successful Focus Groups: Advancing the State of the Art (Vol. 156, pp. 105-117). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [O'Brian suggests focus groups can help with questionnaire formulation in two ways: 1) by helping form the content of the questionnaire (items, questions, wording, research issues), and 2) by letting researchers know what the meaning of the research project means to informants or study population. Author gives good examples of questionnaire formulation from focus groups done with HIV positive men.]

Patton, M. Q. (1980). Qualitative Evaluation Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Though Patton is writing specifically about qualitative methods as used in program evaluations, his book is a wide ranging and useful discussion of qualitative methods, their uses, their objectives, and how they are applied. The first chapter is an introduction to qualitative research that is useful for both beginners and more advanced investigators. Chapter five, on designing qualitative evaluations, is particular instructive for anyone considering how to put together a qualitative research program. A very useful section (P. 159) begins giving a broad typology of research questions (basic, applied, summative, formative, and action research). A chart makes a variety of generalizations about these different research questions, including their typical purposes, foci, key assumptions, etc. Examples are given. He goes on to cover units of analysis, trade-offs between breadth and depth, varieties of purposeful sampling, case study strategies, and other topics. At the end of chapter five Patton briefly discusses research strategies that use pure qualitative methods, as well as ones that mix qualitative and quantitative and experimental methods.]

Patton, M. Q. (1990). Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Chapter five of this book ("Designing Qualitative Studies") is especially useful for those in the contemplation stage of research--that is, those who are beginning to decide what form their research will take. It is a very clear statement of what investigators from any discipline should keep in mind when planning research, especially multimethod or qualitative research.]

Polya, G. (1954). Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [This work considered a good example of how information from a variety of sources can be combined to consider whether a conclusion is valid.]

Punch, M. (1994). Politics and Ethics in Qualitative Research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Methods (pp. 83-97). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Punch writes as sociologist who has encountered extensive ethical issues while doing qualitative fieldwork. Yet he still argues for the notion that fieldwork is important and that students should be encouraged to "just get out there and do it." However, nobody should do qualitative research naïve of the dangers that come with inquiries into people's lives. He goes on to discuss a plethora of ethical and political issues that can come into play during fieldwork.]

Romney, A. K., Weller, S., & Batchelder, W. (1986). Culture as Consensus: A Theory of Culture and Informant Accuracy. American Anthropologist, 88, 313-338. [This is a formative reference for the technique of cultural consensus modeling. To see examples of how it has been applied see Garro (1988), and Chavez, et al. (1995).]

Romney, A. K., Batchelder, W. H., & Weller, S. C. (1987). Recent Applications of Cultural Consensus Theory. American Behavioral Scientist, 2, 163-177. [Authors demonstrate mathematical models of cultural consensus developed in earlier articles with data collected from college students and other sources. The method is designed for anthropologists who, in fieldwork, often have to make judgments about the reliability of their informants without having a detailed knowledge of the domain their informants are telling them about. Cultural consensus helps make such judgments. Authors suggest methods for examining rank order data as well as dichotomous data for determining cultural consensus.]

Ryan, G. (1993). Using Styles in WordPerfect as Templates for your Field Notes. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 5(3), 8-9. [Shows how to use styles in WordPerfect to organize field notes.]

Ryan, G., & Weisner, T. (1996). Analyzing Words in Brief Descriptions: Fathers and Mothers Describe their Children. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 8(3), 13-16. [Outlines a way to use word counts derived from texts that are produced by qualitative research (notes, transcripts, etc.). The objective is to compare qualitative text across groups.]

Ryan, G., & Weisner, T. (1997). Measuring the Prototypicality of Text: Using Intercoder Agreement for More than Just Reliability and Validity Checks . UCLA Sociobehavioral Group: Unpublished manuscript. [Authors suggest that measures of intercoder reliability can be used in another way. They had a class of clinicians in a qualitative data analysis course write descriptions of their last illness. Then they all read each other's descriptions and discussed themes that emerged from them. They determined three themes and then had each student code continuous blocks of text in the descriptions that they judged to have to do with those themes. This constituted data that allowed the calculation of intercoder reliability. However, authors showed how it could also be manipulated to show which parts of the coded passages were more prototypical or exemplary, and which passages got at the core of the theme and which were more peripheral. This is another of the new methods being developed to analyze textual materials gathered through qualitative data collection.]

Schnegg, M., & Bernard, H. R. (1996). Words as Actors: A Method for Doing Semantic Network Analysis. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 8(2), 7-10. [This is a short article about a specific methodology for doing a kind of content analysis. It treats words that reappear in the texts produced by different informants the same way that network analysis treats individual people who are found participating in different social groupings. Authors show how themes emerge when you analyze words as nodes in a network analysis.]

Scott, J. (1991). Social Network Analysis: A Handbook. Woodland Hills, CA: Sage. [Author tries to present a beginner's guide to network analysis that doesn't assume high numeracy. Distinguishes between attribute data (variable analysis), relational data (network analysis), and ideational data (for which he suggests Weber's typological analysis)].

Sechrest, L., Stewart, M., Stickle, T., & Sidani, S. (1997). Effective and Persuasive Case Studies. Cambridge, MA: Human Services Research Institute. [A very useful guide to the particular role case studies may play in mixed-method research. The book aids in the planning and executing case studies illuminate a research sample and help persuade the reader.]

Shweder, R. A. (1996). True Ethnography: The Lore, the Law, and the Lure. In R. Jessor, A. Colby, & R. A. Shweder (Eds.), Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry (pp. 516). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Shweder attempts to decide what "true ethnography" would be. He notes both the sometimes anti-methodological ethos of anthropology, and the traditional informality of methodological teaching. His task seems to be to give a homily on what you can do with ethnography. It is "The lecture I didn't get (or perhaps didn't attend) when I was in graduate school" (17). His conclusion is that you can do ethnography about people without actually being them, without having to "get inside people's heads" (cf. 25).]

Smith, J. J. (1993). Using ANTHROPAC 3.5 and a Spreadsheet to Compute a Free-List Salience Index. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 5(3), 1-3. [Explains how the salience index is created in ANTHROPAC, and its uses in research.]

Spradley, J. P., & McCurdy, D. W. (1972). The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society. Chicago: Science Research Associates. [This is a classic text on ethnography, especially relevant to the relatively short-term use of ethnography within a complex, Western society. The book provides both a primer of ethnographic methods as well as a rich source of brief, exemplary ethnographies from various settings (including several schools) in the US.]

Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. [The classic guide to conducting ethnographic interviews. After a brief background on ethnography, the main section of the book goes step-by-step through the process of locating informants, asking questions, analyzing interview material, and so on right through the writing of an ethnographic piece. The usefulness of this book stems from an integrated approach that explains to the student how each step of the process is related to each other and to the overall ethnographic goals. Should be useful for anyone who is going to do ethnographic (or even unstructured, in-depth) interview.]

Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant Observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. [This book is really about ethnography, with a focus on the hallmark of ethnography--participant observation. The book, written for students, gives step by step instructions for doing a comprehensive ethnographic study with heavy reliance on what can be learned by "just hanging around and watching." It should be useful for anyone whose research could benefit from relatively intensive, long-term observational studies.]

Stack, C. B. (1974). All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row. [In a classic of US ethnography, Stack writes an intimate portrayal of African-American families and the communities they just adapt to in order to survive.]

Stake, R. E. (1994). Case Studies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 236-247). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Stake focuses his article on how to design research so that it optimizes what can be learned from a case, rather than focusing on how to generalize from case studies. The very useful introduction notes different ways case studies are used (intrinsic, instrumental, and collective studies) and gives several examples from the literature of each of these uses. A good source for reflection on what case studies are, and should be.]

Steward, D. W., & Shamdasani, P. N. (1990). Focus Groups: Theory and Practice. (Vol. 20). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [One of the many recent guides to doing focus groups. Useful for those contemplating using focus groups as an important part of their research.]

Stone, L., & Campbell, J. G. (1984). The Use and Misuse of Surveys in International Development: An Experiment from Nepal. Human Organization, 43, 27-37. [A discussion of how the setting of survey research, the identity of researchers, how questions are asked, and how they are interpreted by respondents affect survey research in international development settings. These factors may create part of the disparity between what people report and what they do. This piece shows the need to combine qualitative methods with survey research.]

Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Considered the most readable and comprehensive introduction to grounded theory and its relationship to qualitative data. Authors explain how to derive theory from textual, qualitative data. Their discussion of "theoretical sensitivity" is considered excellent. A great source of arguments against those who claim a lack of rigor in qualitative analysis.]

Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (Eds.). (1997). Grounded Theory in Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Super, C. M., & Harkness, S. (in press). The Environment as Culture in Developmental Research. In T. D. Wachs & S. L. Friedman (Eds.), Assessment of the Environment Across the Lifespan . Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association.

Tharp, R. G., & Gallimore, R. (1982). Inquiry Process in Program Development. Journal of Community Psychology, 10(2), 103-118. [Authors focus on the long term evaluation of action research and the use of evaluation to change the course of that research. They suggest there are more ways of knowing what's going on than the classic statistical comparison of treatment vs. non-treatment groups. They suggest different methods, such as "personal knowing," experimentation, data guidance, and program evaluation can coexist in a kind of ecology where each strengthens the other. The lesson can be carried over from the field of evaluation to that of multimethod research and their discussion of the syncretism of methods should be very valuable to those planning such research.]

Tinsley, H. E., & Weiss, D. J. (1975). Interrater Reliability and Agreement of Subjective Judgments. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 22(4), 358-376. [Interrater reliability and agreement are reviewed, and suggestions are given in terms of their use in counseling psychology research. The difference between agreement and reliability is clarified, and the similarities between these indexes and the degree of measurement and category of replication are explained. Indexes of interrater reliability appropriate for use with ordinal and interval scales are considered. The intraclass correlation as a measure of interrater reliability is discussed in terms of the treatment of between raters' variance and the appropriateness of the reliability estimates based on composite or individual ratings. Optimal weighting schemes for calculating composite ratings are also taken into account. Also described are the measures of interrater agreement for ordinal and interval scales, along with interrrator agreement for data at the nominal level of measurement.]

Trochim, W. M. K. (1989). An Introduction to Concept Mapping For Planning and Evaluation. Evaluation and Program Planning, 12, 1-16. [Article introduces a way of using free listing, pile sorting, hierarchical clustering, and multidimensional scaling to help program planners better conceptualize and visualize their analytical categories. This is oriented toward program planning and evaluation rather than investigative research, but the same need applies when a group of researchers are exploring qualitative data for themes. This method could help a group of researchers understand the organization of their "etic" analytic ideas just as this technique has been used to help understand the organization of particular cultural domains of their informants (see systematic data collection).]

Truex, G. F. (1993). Tagging and Tying: Notes on Codes in Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 5(1), 3-5. [Describes coding conventions for marking blocks of text. This allows the thematic coding of the textual products of qualitative data collection, so that passages about particular themes can be easily retrieved. Also reviews how to use the DtSearch program to retrieve the blocked units.]

Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [An oft'-cited source for the point of view that ethnography as an "interpretive act." This book is part of the movement to reconceptualize ethnographic writing as the result of an interplay between investigator and investigated, rather than as the objective rendering of the live of a group of people.]

Webb, E. J., Campbell, D. T., Schwartz, R. D., Sechrest, L., & Grove, J. (1981). Nonreactive Measures in the Social Sciences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. [This book (second edition of a book titled Unobtrusive Measures) discusses a disparate collection of observational and data collection methods. They share only the characteristic that, unlike survey questionnaires, they "do not require the cooperation of a respondent and . . . do not themselves contaminate the response" (2). The authors note that survey questionnaires have become the dominant sociological method, and that they are used perhaps too exclusively. They do not endeavor to criticize questionnaires, but to suggest a wide range of other methods that can be used in conjunction with them. The authors note that some of these methods may raise ethical concerns but they do not strive to deal with these concerns in their volume, leaving discretion in their application to the reader.]

Weber, R. P. (1990). Basic Content Analysis. (second ed.). (Vol. 49). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [A good introduction to content analysis, particularly the use of computers to extract and code themes from textual materials.]

Weiner, R. L., Wiley, D., Huelsman, T., & Hilgemann, A. (1994). Needs Assessment: Combining Qualitative Interviews and Concept Mapping Methodology. Evaluation Review, 18(2), 227-240. [This study used concept mapping (a combination of free listing, pile sorts, hierarchical clustering, and multidimensional scaling--see Trochim 1989) to provide a needs assessment for a crisis management clinic. The concept mapping method helps planners to visualize and analyze their categories of analysis--in this case the needs of the clinic. Like Trochim (1989) this article demonstrates a method that might be useful to research planners as well as evaluation or program planners.]

Weisner, T. S. (1996). Why Ethnography Should Be the Most Important Method in the Study of Human Development. In R. Jessor, A. Colby, & R. A. Shweder (Eds.), Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry (pp. 305-324). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Weisner forcefully argues that the single most important factor for normal child development is not simply the features that we Americans think of first--bonding, safety, etc. It is that a child be provided with a "cultural place" in which to develop. It is the same point, contextualized differently, that anthropologists make when they say that culture makes individual cognition possible. The importance of this chapter in the present context is that Weisner suggests that the traditional dichotomies (qualitative vs. quantitative, naturalistic vs. experimental, and cultural vs. culture-free research) are wrong, and tend to belittle naturalistic, cultural, and qualitative inquiry. He notes that qualitative research is not the "opposite" of quantitative research. The real opposite of qualitative or holistic research is particularistic--or specifically focused--research. Quantitative is not the opposite of qualitative, but rather has to do with the level of measurement available or appropriate for a study. Quantitative levels of measurement could instead be contrasted with nominal or categorical levels. "Naturalistic" studies contrast with research that is in some way contrived by researchers. Experimental work, which attempts to infer cause, is usefully contrasted with correlational studies attempting to discover relationships and patterns. Comparative studies have no opposite. All studies have an implicit comparative frame of reference of some sort--a meaning in a context relevant to some cultural place, whether for the purpose of cultural comparison or not. In this sense, all studies have an 'ethnographic component' embedded in them, even if ethnography was not done.]

Weisner, T. S., Matheson, C. C., & Bernheimer, L. P. (1996). American Cultural Models of Early Influence and Parent Recognition of Developmental Delays: Is Earlier Always Better than Later? In S. Harkness & C. M. Super (Eds.), Parents' Cultural Belief Systems: Their Origins, Expressions, and Consequences (pp. 496-531). New York: Guilford Press. [Authors discuss schema theory and the "ecocultural" perspective and their applications in studying families of children with developmental delays. The central question is whether it is always best to identify developmental delays as early as possible. They go on to describe a prospective study that enrolled families with two to three-year-olds with developmental delays. These families were restudied when the child was 6 to 7-years-old. Semistructured "ecocultural" interviews examined a number of domains important to determining the families' daily accommodations to their child's developmental delay. They describe interview that result in both qualitative information about families' lives as well as ratings that can be used in a multivariate analysis.]

Weisner, T. S. (1996). The 5-7 Transition as an Ecocultural Project. In A. Sameroff & M. Haith (Eds.), Reason and Responsibility: The Passage through Childhood (pp. 295-326). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Weisner examines the child development transition between 5 and 7 years of age. He presents a "family adaptation hypothesis" to explain this transition. Semi-structured "ecocultural" interviews and analysis of coding of those interviews are described.]

Weitzman, E. A., & Miles, M. B. (1995). Computer Programs for Qualitative Data Analysis: A Software Sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Reviews 23 software programs that help you analyze text. A very good introduction to text analysis, and to the text analysis software available as of 1995. Worth purchasing if you plan on doing a lot of text analysis in your career.]

Weller, S. C. (1983). New Data on Intracultural Variability: The Hot-Cold Concept of Medicine and Illness. Human Organization, 42(3), 249-257. [Weller's study produced visual representations of the relationship between disease categories in Guatemala vis-à-vis the "hot-cold" concept. Free list, pile sort, and triadic comparisons were used to collect data that was then subjected to multidimensional scaling. Since data was collected from both rural and urban women, and the data remained individual data rather than aggregate data, a comparison of rural and urban women produced a measure of intracultural variability.]

Weller, S. C. (1986). Personal Preferences and Ethnic Variations among Anglo and Hispanic Breast and Bottle Feeders. Social Science and Medicine, 23(6), 539-548. [Article explains the personal preferences for bottle and/or breast feeding among Anglo and Hispanic women. The perceived advantages and disadvantages of each method were determined using interviews. Also, surveys are used to rank the order of the preferences of each. Chi-squared and discriminate analysis were used to analyze socio-demographic data. To get the preferred characteristic of each, multidimensional scaling was used. Results showed that all women valued having their baby "full and satisfied" and wanted to make sure their baby was getting the nutrients it needed. There was a marked preference for breast feeding among Anglo women and no clear preference among Hispanic women.]

Weller, S., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [This is a classic introduction to systematic techniques for modeling cultural understandings and beliefs. Covers free listing, triad tests, pile sorts, and the kinds of analyses these data can be subjected to.]

Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1990). Metric Scaling: Correspondence Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Authors recommend three methods that allow the examination of the relationship between multiple variables. They discuss the pros and cons of each, and recommend when to use these methods. They focus on principal components analysis, multidimensional preference scaling, and correspondence analysis. A good source for the "systematically inclined."]

Werner, O., & Schoepfle, G. M. (1987). Systematic Fieldwork. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [This two volume set assumes the primacy of the "insider's point of view of culture." It is a guide to about field research emphasizing the cognitive or ethnoscience perspective. The first of the two volumes, "Foundations of Ethnography and Interviewing," covers methods used in field research or ethnography, including observation, interviewing, questionnaires, and a host of other issues from epistemology to rapport to audio recording. The second volume, "Ethnographic Analysis and Data Management," covers such topics as fieldnote indexing, semantic analysis, decision modeling, textual analysis, data presentation and ethnographic writing.]

Werner, O. (1992). Short Take 8: Hapax Legomenon: First Steps in Analyzing your Interviews. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 4(3), 6-8. [This short article simply shows how doing a word frequency count on fieldnotes can quickly identify "content words"--words that show up more than once in a text. For longer documents the list of content words is as low as 5% of the total number of words in the text (total words, not total unique words). The content words can be examined for themes, and can be used as an index to the text.]

Werner, O. (1993). Short Take 11: Constructed Folk Definitions from Interviews. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 5(3), 4-7. [Werner contrasts "elicited folk definitions" (informants' statements about what something means) with "constructed folk definitions" (definition inherent in how informants' use a word). Werner provides a conceptually simple but potentially powerful computer analysis of interview text that allows the construction of folk definitions from the discussion by informants, during qualitative interviews, of what ever the concepts are for which the investigator seeks a definition.]

Werner, O., & Bernard, H. R. (1994). Short Take 13: Ethnographic Sampling. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 6(2), 7-9. [This short article compares random sampling and ethnographic sampling and suggests what there is to be learned from both methods. Helpful graphics, especially on page nine, make this a more useful article.]

Werner, O. (1995). Short Take 15: The Case for Verbatim Cases. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 7(1), 6-8. [Demonstrates the usefulness of short verbatim anecdotes.]

Werner, O. (1996). Short Take 18: Notation for Transcribing Conversation and Interviews. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 3. [Conventions for transcribing interviews and other verbally collected data.]

Whyte, W. F. (1955). Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Whyte describes what became one of the classic studies of qualitative sociology. His study took place in an Italian slum in an eastern city in the late 1930s. He describes some of the forces that shaped people's lives in that context. This book is remembered not only because of his detailed ethnographic descriptions, but because of a methodological appendix in which he frankly, and at length, discusses his ethnographic method. Still relevant today, his description of his learning "on the job" and the ethical issues he encountered in extended fieldwork are a must read for anybody contemplating ethnography in the urban US or any urban society.]

Whyte, W. F. (1984). Learning from the Field: A Guide from Experience. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [A comprehensive guide to planning and executing fieldwork. It covers an extraordinary range of practical and theoretical issues confronting those who would use a variety of methods in field research. The emphasis is on combining methods in ways appropriate for the goals of the research. Qualitative anthropological methods are discussed alongside surveys and quantitative measures. The book contains a strong dose of practical advice from a long-time fieldworker.]

Williams, T. (1992). Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. [Williams describes the structure and location of a typical ghetto crackhouse. These are usually run down apartment complexes in poverty stricken portions of town. Data were collected through observing participants in the crackhouse scene. Other data was from interviews in which Williams repeatedly asked about the same things over an extended period of time since he believed that many of his informants were telling lies, or exaggerating the truth. He describes and explains the daily operation of a crackhouse and to examine some of the stereotypes of such places. He suggests that people using crackhouses were more diverse than most would expect, and that the one thing they all shared was their addiction.]

Yoder, P. S. (1995). Examining Ethnomedical Diagnoses and Treatment Choices for Diarrheal Disorders in Lubumbashi Swahili. Medical Anthropology, 16, 211-247. [Author demonstrates a short-term ethnographic method, or combination of methods, designed to answer specific questions about ethnomedical understanding and practice. Article focuses on diarrheal disorders in Lubumbashi, Zaire. Surveys and group interviews are administered to get a general idea of how mothers diagnose and treat their children. A baseline and follow up survey are used to see exactly what symptoms lead to diagnoses and how that lead to treatment (oral rehydration therapy). Results indicated that ethnomedical diagnosis are based on observed symptoms.]